Students at Carleton University are warning each other to stay alert after a fraudulent job posting appeared on the university’s MySuccess portal last month.
The university said it has reviewed its protocols to prevent this incident from reoccurring and insisted it was a rare occurrence.
Julien Rougerie, a fourth year computer science student at Carleton, was looking for a summer job when he encountered a listing for a job at Coldwell Banker Rhodes and Company, a local real estate company, on the university’s website.
The job description asked for an office assistant and offered $400 weekly. Rougerie, who said the job description and pay attracted him to the position, sent his resume through email to Lashawn Ayers, the listed contact, on June 10.
After several emails and text messages between him and Ayers, Rougerie received a job offer. Although he considered taking the job, he began to realize it was a scam.
The final email he received was very similar to the fraudulent job emails frequently sent out to students, he said. Rougerie said he decided to look up “Lashawn Ayers” on Google and on Coldwell’s website but did not find the name under the company’s list of agents or in Ottawa in general.
On June 15, Rougerie told Ayers he would not be taking the job and immediately blocked them to prevent the scammer from contacting him again.
“It feels like Carleton’s got a big issue with scammers,” he said. “Ever since [COVID-19], it’s been a whole lot worse.”
According to a Better Business Bureau study, 14 million people were exposed to employment scams in 2019, resulting in $2 billion in direct losses. The problem has worsened since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Carleton has acknowledged the rise of email job scams and taken action to combat them through a “report phishing” button and a webpage with information on scam emails. However, the university declined to comment on whether it will take action to prevent scam job postings from making their way onto the MySuccess job board.
In an email to the Charlatan, Jim McKeown, broker of record and partner at Coldwell, said the company found out about the impersonator from a student who called to ask about the job on June 16, confirming multiple people had seen and possibly proceeded with the job application.
The company notified Carleton Career Services, which took down the job posting on June 17, he said.
Rougerie said he also notified the university as soon as he concluded the posting was a scam on June 15. Regan Barager, a career coach at Carleton, told Rougerie in an email the job was posted on behalf of the co-op office.
On June 16, Carleton’s Career Services IT department sent an email to all students who had viewed the fraudulent job posting on the MySuccess portal. The email, sent six days after Rougerie had applied for the job, told students not to proceed with the job application and to contact the IT department if they had been defrauded.
In an email to the Charlatan, Sarah Sabourin, manager of employment and partnership development for Carleton Career Services, said that while there are multiple safeguards in place to make sure only legitimate postings make it onto the job board, scammers are “increasingly tenacious and tech-savvy.”
Looking back, Rougerie said while the job posting was “kind of convincing,” double-checking the email address the scammer contacted him from early on may have helped him realize something was off.
The university declined to comment on how many students were affected by the scam.
Featured graphic by Angel Xing.
